In order to conserve storage space and transmission bandwidth, video streams are encoded (or compressed). Existing compression standards for encoding video streams include H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10 (defined in ISO-IEC 14496-10). H.264 compression uses an enormous amount of computations to create a quality encoding of an input video stream. Many of these computations can be carried out in parallel, and some must be carried out in series.
It would be desirable to implement a system that performs computations quickly to accomplish high definition video encoding in real-time.